Senior Robotics Engineer · Senior Researcher
Ten years across swarm intelligence, industrial mobile robots and autonomous mobility - a PhD in collective behaviour, production C++ shipped on industrial AMRs, and field robotic deployments from the Venice lagoon to AI deployments in public transport in Austria.
About
I work at the seam where research meets hardware that has to survive contact with the real world.
My PhD asked whether the many bio-inspired swarm behaviours in the literature were really separate algorithms, or one algorithm wearing different clothes. Answering it meant taking theory all the way down to embedded C on robots dropped into the Venice lagoon. Since then I have spent three years writing production C++ for industrial mobile robots, and now lead EU-funded work on autonomous mobility and last-mile delivery at JKU. Some selected work is shown below. Scroll down for the organizations that I have previously worked for.
What connects those is a preference for systems that get built and measured rather than only published. I am most useful on problems that span the whole stack - perception and estimation through planning and control, down to the firmware and the wiring.
Currently based in Linz, Austria, and increasingly focused on bringing learning-based methods into deployed robotic systems.
Selected work
Image: SSI SCHÄFER
Core localization and control software for a prominent industrial mobile robot
Built the core localization interface and C++ control modules for Fastbots, a prominent, agile industrial mobile robot platform. Drove hardware integration, software development and testing across its first three iterations, taking it from prototype to product.
Leading EU-funded work on last-mile delivery and pedestrian safety around autonomous vehicles
Technical lead for the EU-funded OptiPEX project optimizing passenger experience in public transport systems. My work here leads the development of onboard occupancy detection and a novel pedestrian localization system, based on ultra-wideband technology, that reduces collision risk with pedestrians in shared spaces.
Lidar-only autonomy on a 1/10-scale race car - from a Nav2 baseline to a custom MPC
Led the design and build of JKU's F1TENTH autonomous racing platform end to end - hardware and software. A lidar-only ROS 2 stack running on a Jetson AGX Xavier, closing a 50 Hz control loop with a purpose-built MPC that replaced an initial Nav2 baseline and went from integration to race-ready in two weeks. Placed 10th at ICRA 2026 in Vienna, the team's first competition.
One design paradigm for collective behaviour - formalised in a PhD, validated in the Venice lagoon
Six years on subCULTron, designing and deploying swarms of underwater robots that coordinate through minimalistic local communication - no central controller, no global state. The doctoral strand argued that the sprawling family of bio-inspired swarm algorithms consists largely of instances of a single design paradigm; the field strand took that paradigm down to embedded C/C++ and into the Venice lagoon.
Experience
04/2024 - Present Postdoctoral Researcher, Intelligent Transport Systems
09/2021 - 03/2024 Robotics Core Software Developer
11/2015 - 07/2021 Researcher
06/2012 - 10/2015 Process Engineer
06/2010 - 07/2012 Assistant Manager, Plant Maintenance
11/2015 - 11/2019 PhD in Computer Science
Investigated a unifying paradigm to unite bio-inspired collective behaviours and validated it on real robots. Advisors: Prof. Franz Wotawa, Prof. Thomas Schmickl.
07/2012 - 06/2013 MSc in Mechatronics
Major in control systems and embedded systems. GPA 4.25/5.
08/2006 - 05/2010 BTech, Electrical and Electronics Engineering
Major in control systems and embedded systems. GPA 8.92/10.
Contact
If you are working on robot learning, autonomous mobility, or moving research-grade autonomy into products, I would like to hear about it.
